Track 27: Delayed Satisfaction by Eric Gunnar Johnson
1984, Hinckley, Ohio
Hey! Let’s Party — that’s the title of a long-play vinyl record salvaged from a box a floor below ground in my father’s home. The album came out two years after I did. Impossibly, its cellophane wrap remains. I find it satisfying knowing no fingers have ever touched its cardboard sleeve.
The back cover is so densely packed with text one could easily consume two bowls of LIFE before they finished reading. All those words promoting its content just in case its excellent title isn’t enough to beckon a clerk to rid you of three and a half dollars in 1966. The first sentence reads, “MONGO SANTAMARIA! You don’t have to be an expert in Afro-Cuban musical influences, a jazz buff, a jet setter, or a teenage hipster to be familiar with Mongo’s name or dig his music.” Take my money!
It is a collection of cover versions of popular music from the era. The Afro-Cuban reimagination of The Rolling Stones’ hit “Satisfaction" was the grooviest and most accessible track for my then-20-year-old sensibilities.
On the front cover, framed in a circle, is a photograph of a small group of white suburban teenage baby boomers captured mid-dance-step donning quintessential 60s garb—mustard yellow being the favored hue.
1967, Broadview Heights, Ohio
I witnessed with regularity scenes like the one depicted on the face of Hey! Let’s Party as a toddler through first grade. Roused by bass and laughter, I would throw off my bedding, pad down a short hallway, and pause to marvel at the power strokes in a framed replica of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers hung on the wall at the top of the stairs. Then, quietly inching my way downward, landing one foot then the other, both on each step. Again and again until the stairwell wall disappeared near the fourth step up from the landing.
There I sat, amazed, silently watching my parents and their friends dancing, drinking, and laughing loudly. Booming declarations are broadcast with extended gestures and broad smiles. Some sang along to the sonic musings: Etta James, Janis Joplin, Aretha—you-make-me-feel-like-a-nat-cher-el-woman— the lyric descending like royalty down a stairway carpeted red.
1971, November 5, Mayfield, Ohio
Like buttercream frosting on a chocolate cake, a spray of white roses rests atop a mahogany box. I’m not sure my mother’s body lay inside—my father decided a closed casket would benefit his sons. What I do know is what I remember.
I remember happiness. Not because I wasn’t sad, but because I was seven in the company of family. In my mind, it was a party on a sunny early November Indian Summer Friday. And I got to ride in a limousine.
My mother’s youngest sister and I approached alone,
“These flowers are beautiful, Eric. Did you pick them out?”
“Yes,” I lied.
“Well, you have good taste.”
“That’s because I’m chewing gum.”
1971, October 25, Chagrin Falls, Ohio
Our cramped, tiny red house is crowded with friends and relatives. Their presence blocks a good portion of natural light that begs entry into what little space there is through three small windows. I am unsure why they are here. My father’s birthday is three days away, but I don’t know that. My mother’s best friend Anita is crying at the kitchen table. My 10-year-old brother tells me a lie. I report it to the authorities as baby brothers do,
“Dad, you know what Matt said? He said Mom died.”
Dad ignores me but soon leads us boys down a short hallway. My father is sitting on the edge of my mother’s bed. Matt sits to his left. Kent—fourteen—his right. I am standing, facing the three. Without a preamble, my father says,
“Mom died.”
Kent is silent and still. His long black hair is much like our mother’s. I focus on his folded hands resting upon his lap. Matt begins to wail. His face, blood-filled and contorted, finds my father’s chest. Like an airborne contagion, his pain infects me, and I begin to cry. Three steps, and we are locked in each other’s arms: inconsolable, faces mashed, saturated in blended tears.
My father later explained,
“She could have lived but would have been a vegetable.”
This conditional element provided comfort, as I pictured her lying in bed as a giant piece of broccoli.
1971, October 19, Chagrin Falls, Ohio
Matt finds her semi-conscious in the tiny bathroom on a Tuesday morning. Kent and I join him just outside the door. We stand motionless as if watching a home movie where the film seizes after getting jammed in the gate—the intense heat from the bulb melting the celluloid. We don’t know what to make of it and don’t know how to fix it. Dad was always the projectionist, but he now has an apartment somewhere on the west side.
Foam and remnants of the previous night’s repast are visible outside her mouth. Our black-furred dog, Duchess, is pawing anxiously at our mother’s splayed black hair. She is dressed in a shin-length, bone-white nightgown, which has been disrupted into odd folds from the fall. Matt asked if she could drive us to school, as we missed our buses.
“Yes,” she says, with no “and” for infinity.
Kent calls the police, requesting an ambulance. Paramedics arrive. I do not recall them lifting her, carrying her, loading her. She was transported to Hillcrest Hospital. There, she perished—a brain aneurysm.
A few weeks prior, at her sister Alice’s home— all of us there—celebrating Labor Day, I did see EMTs lift her onto a gurney. Her head flailed back and forth as they struggled to keep her hands from pulling an oxygen mask from her face.
I screamed at them,
“Stop, you’re hurting her!”
What I saw were two uniformed men trying to suffocate my mom. An adult, in a calming tone, hands to my shoulders, promised,
“They’re just trying to help.”
1991, Akron, Ohio
I am 27 years old, asleep in a single bed—alone without a woman for the first time in five years— negotiating a dream about my mother. It is the first and only REM visit she would ever make.
In the dream, I am planning a trip to meet her at a music festival in Spain. Mongo Santamaria is the headlining act. I am breathlessly anticipating the prospect of seeing my mother again. My flight is booked, but I haven’t yet secured a concert ticket. When it comes time for me to travel, I see her face in my imagination (Imagine imagining an image in an imaginary state). She is no longer forever thirty-three. Her face is lined, and her hair is grey. She is barely recognizable. After reflection, I reassess my plans and ultimately decide that I do not want to see my mother aged a day more than I remember her. I cancel my trip, then wake from the dream half-conscious.
I notice that I am sobbing. But I am not sad. I am laughing through my tears. A weight is lifted. I am free. And that’s it. Almost twenty years a hostage, manacles in pieces.
“It’s over,” I say aloud to no one, bringing my torso vertical.
I own the morning, and the mourning is gone. Forever. And I know it.
I still think about her. I have not forgotten. It’s just that memories are no longer coupled with pain. My resignation is delivered with satisfaction.
Eric Gunnar Johnson is an award-winning graphic designer, fine artist, and writer in Ellicott, New York. He and his wife share a life and home surrounded by nature overlooking the Conewango Valley.
